


tidy

by winterfire22



Series: losers remembering [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: F/M, Mentioned Maturin | The Turtle, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris Are Best Friends, Stan Uris Lives, allusions to sex but nothing graphic, anyway other than the very ending it is cannon compliant, because this is my party and i choose the movie, but this takes place in the 90s and early 2000s, cannon compliant but not in the end of part two tee hee, ch 1 is all the times he remembers in his twenties, ch 2 will be all the times he remembers in his thirties, i love patty also, mostly movie cannon but with some things from book cannon, she is the light of my life, stanpat - Freeform, such as the infertility thing and atlanta, this is going to be a fix it in part two, you can't make me kill him i simply won't do it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:33:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24955366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterfire22/pseuds/winterfire22
Summary: stan uris doesn’t like messes. and the holes in his memory… the fleeting fragments of his childhood that occasionally unsheath themselves… well, those things are pretty messy. here are some moments when he almost remembers his childhood friends-- along with some things that are decidedly more sinister.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom & Stanley Uris, Beverly Marsh & Stanley Uris, Bill Denbrough & Stanley Uris, Eddie Kaspbrak & Stanley Uris, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, Richie Tozier & Stanley Uris, Stanley Uris & Mike Hanlon, The Losers Club & Stanley Uris
Series: losers remembering [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1806184
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	1. twenties

_all of this turbulence wasn't forecasted_  
_apologies from the intercom_  
_and i am relieved that I'd left my room tidy_  
_they'll think of me kindly_  
_when they come for my things_

1.

He is twenty years old. His college campus opens up wide before him as he turns away from her dorm, hands in his pockets, to head back to his own. He’d watched her fumble to get her dorm key out of her purse. Watched her glance over her shoulder at him, embarrassed red folded across her nose like a melody. Watched her find the key and slide it into the lock and twist it. Smiled at her, because he can’t help but smile at her. He has drawn things out absolutely as long as possible, and now he has to go back to his own dorm.

He doesn’t mind the walk, even if it’s kind of cold. He likes walking her home. He knows-- by something inexplicable and hazy, tucked away deep in his chest-- when things are dangerous and when they aren’t. So he knows that Patty would be fine if he let her walk home alone. But he welcomes any chance to stay at her side for five more minutes, and he wouldn’t want her to feel uneasy walking alone in the dark, uncloaked by the assured certainty he feels himself.

Besides, sometimes it’s nice to walk around in the dark. He thinks straighter outside, and the air feels clean at night. He makes a quiet list of things he needs to do. Wash bedding tomorrow. Study for the history test, probably a little bit tonight and then more tomorrow. Clean out his backpack, maybe tomorrow, maybe tonight if he’s still awake enough after studying.

Behind him, somewhere nearby, he hears someone hit the ground.

Immediately he turns. Blinks into the near-darkness a few times. The boy who’d tripped is already standing back up, brushing himself off, laughing a little with his friend. They’re probably drunk. He’s probably fine.

It’s funny. For a moment, when he hears the thud against the soft campus grass, he thinks he knows who it was. For a moment, he remembers being a kid, hearing

someone,

Fall behind him. But by the time he manages to get a good glance at this boy, here, right now, he knows the guy is a stranger. Knows it isn’t the friend he almost sees in his mind, a quiet, earnest boy who usually has headphones around his neck and a book or two in his arm.

Stan faces forward again. By the time he makes it to his own dorm room, his mind has neatly shifted back to the topic of the history test.

2.

He is twenty-one years old. He’s nose deep in physics homework, frowning at it, wondering why an accountant would need to know physics. His notes don’t quite make sense. He’s always been good in school, sure, but this isn’t something he’s ever felt his way through before-- it’s a new subject, and his ease with math isn’t offering him much clarity or comfort.

Eyes flitting back and forth between his textbook, his notes, and his homework, he reaches for his coffee cup without looking. It’s after three. His roommate Matt will be letting himself into their small shared apartment any minute now, talking, joking, cracking open a diet Pepsi and turning the TV on. Stanley needs to focus if he’s going to figure this equation out before it’s too late.

But he’s miscalculated the location of his coffee cup by a few millimeters. When he reaches for it, instead of pulling it neatly into his grasp, he knocks it off the table and sends it careening to a certain death on the cracked linoleum floor. It reaches its fate with a splash and an uncomfortable collapse that rings through his ears.

He sighs. Rubs at his eyes, glances at his watch, and swoops off his chair to assess the damage. 

Three pieces. The few undrunk tablespoons of coffee rolling like a secret midnight river. 

He runs the numbers. Clean up the glass first, he decides, then the liquid. 

The handle and the base of the mug are in tact, with the second piece accounting for half the mug, and the third piece spanning only two or three inches, a haphazard, last minute shard. He reaches for this smallest piece first.

But he comes at it from the wrong angle. It slices through the pad of his thumb. 

He cringes, but doesn’t drop it. On his knees, he looks at his hand, shard resting on his palm, blood blooming from the crack in his skin. It stings hard, a hurt he can feel behind his ears. He draws air into his lungs, stalling, waiting for the pain to stop.

But of course it doesn’t stop. And as he looks down at it, as he feels the grit of his teeth and the sting behind his ears, his lips part, and his tongue begins to form words

swear?

He bites his lip instead of speaking. His apartment is empty. There’s no one to hear the sentence that almost slid from his mind. The boy he almost remembers swearing to-- with his big, determined green eyes and his furrowed brows-- isn’t here.

He sighs. Moves with improved caution to pick up the glass shards. Throws them away before rinsing his slit thumb under the kitchen sink.

3.

He is twenty-three years old. It’s May 15, 1999-- his wedding day. A beautiful, warm Saturday in late spring. He sits in his car, parked outside the temple, hair tucked under a kippah, bowtie the slightest bit crooked, suit jacket stiff on the backs of his shoulders.

He feels out of place. He is comfortable under the kippah, comfortable stepping through the doors, comfortable with the words that will be said and the things that will happen. Comfortable wouldn’t be enough of a word to describe how he feels about the woman he’s about to marry-- ‘in love with’ isn’t even quite enough. He’s relieved to know her, delighted to look at her, honored to be here today with her-- he adores every second of her, every centimeter, every drop. The world is better for every moment of her existence. She is the most natural, most wonderful thing that has ever happened to him, and he would have gladly married her three years ago when they first met if not for school and their parents and social conventions. 

But still, he feels out of place.

No. _Something_ feels out of place. Not him. He is exactly where he’s supposed to be. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong, and this day, this choice, is absolutely flawlessly perfectly right. But something isn’t in its place. Something has loosed a speck into the gears, small enough that they still turn, big enough that they don’t turn without a little bit of friction.

He gets out of his car and buttons his jacket closed as he makes his way toward the synagogue, an old stone building in Massachusetts, the synagogue his fiancée attended weekly for most of her life. By the time he gets to the basement-- the designated groom waiting area-- the two members of his wedding party are waiting for him. His cousin Aaron, his old roommate Matt. He smiles at them. They smile back. 

This is the thing that isn’t quite right, he thinks as he sits in this room with the two of them, waiting to be ushered upstairs to take his place at the end of the aisle. These two. Aaron is his best man by proxy-- the two had hardly spent any time together growing up. Matt is the closest friend he has, but the two of them were always more roommates than friends. Stan spends most of his time alone or with Patty. 

A thought rolls through his mind like a marble on an attic floor. There’s someone else who should be here instead. A forgotten relic of his past. Matt and Aaron are Jewish, too, accustomed to synagogues and kippahs and Hebrew. The person who should be here instead should be

loud and annoying,

Whispering inappropriate jokes to Stan at the worst possible times, making a borderline embarrassing best man speech, throwing something across the synagogue’s lawn after the ceremony, his dark eyes shining his silent approval over the life Stan has chosen.

Where is this person? What was his name? Why is his memory so loose, so slippery, so thin?

He exhales.

Nerves? Aaron asks. Stanley shakes his head. Absolutely not. It’s just weird to have to do this in front of everyone. To stand in front of every member of the Blum and Uris families and feel their eyes on him as he kisses her and stomps on a glass to seal the deal. Matt laughs a little bit. You’re gonna be fine, man.

He fakes a smile. It will be real when he’s standing there, when he’s watching her come toward him, face covered by a veil, flowers in her hands. At that moment, it will feel as if it’s just him and her, as if the whole world was made for them and everyone else just happens to be there. But right now, in this unfamiliar basement with two half-unfamiliar groomsmen, something still feels out of place, and the smile at his lips is forced.

4.

He is twenty-five years old. He’s grocery shopping with his wife, still in his collared shirt and slacks from work, though he’d taken his tie off in the car and pushed his shirt sleeves up to his elbows. 

She leans down to get the laundry detergent, and he pretends not to notice how good those jeans look on her. He’ll tell her later, maybe whisper it in her ear as he takes them off of her. An eighth of a smile nudging at his mouth, he reaches for the dryer sheets a couple feet away. Crosses both items off the list.

Produce. Peaches are in season. He runs the pad of his thumb over the fuzz as he puts a few in a bag. At home, he’ll wash them, and set them into the fruit bowl on the counter.

As they join a checkout line a few moments later, list all sorted, she sets her hand on his arm. He meets her rich brown eyes. Stanley, she says, in that beautiful way she speaks, like she’s whispering poetry to the sun. What’s going on?

He blinks, breaking their eye contact, and frowns a little. I’m not sure what you mean, sweetheart, he replies.

She points out that he keeps looking over his shoulder. That he seems on edge. Like someone is following them. Is someone following us?

He shakes his head. Takes her hand in his and squeezes it. No, of course not. 

Stanley hadn’t realized he was doing that-- looking over his shoulder, keeping an eye out for an expired threat he can’t quite name. He grins at her, tells her there’s no need to worry, everything is peachy.

Hours later, though, he can’t sleep. He tries to stay still so he won’t wake her up. Stares into the darkness of their bedroom. He’s been through two nightmares already tonight. He can never quite remember what happened in them by the time he wakes up, aside from damp darkness-- that, and the most biting fear he’s ever felt. He gets the idea that if he were able to look past the haze of the forgotten dream, past the damp blackness, he would see red.

He shifts onto his side, and reaches his arms around his wife, hoping she won’t wake up to feel his slamming heart against her back.

5.

He is twenty-seven years old. Traffic is bad this morning in Atlanta. He brings his Sedan to a smooth stop, leaving a neat, car-sized gap between its front bumper and the back bumper of the green Subaru ahead of him, sporting a Washington license plate along with a bumper sticker that reads ‘honk if you believe in Bigfoot’. Stanley does not honk.

He reaches for the radio knob. Allows the sound of the Wednesday morning news to fill his car. Wonders if last night was the night, if he will have reason to call his parents with good news soon, if the three bottles of red wine on top of the fridge will be allowed to collect dust. 

He hopes they will. He would choose frowning his way through crib and high chair manuals (and buying tools just to build them) than getting wine drunk any day. They had two chances last night, and she knows about these things, knows that the day was right for it. In a few weeks, they’ll have an answer.

The news prattles on as he waits for traffic. Weather report-- it should be sunny all day, but it might rain in the evening. A new restaurant is opening downtown; Greek food. There was a fire late last night, an apartment building behind a library.

He frowns. He once knew someone whose house had burnt down, he thinks. Without meaning to, he reaches for the radio knob and shuts it off.

This person had only been a little kid. For a moment, Stanley almost remembers hearing the story. They were sitting outside, on a bench, someone between them. Screams, and hands pounding on the door, and 

the friend,

He had been the only survivor.

Stanley reaches to unroll his window an inch or two. For some air flow. His car has begun to feel stuffy and hot and uncomfortable.

The fire he’s thinking of, from when his friend was a little kid-- his friend was the only survivor. It cast a shadow over his soft brown eyes as he spoke of it. It hardened him, even just for a moment.

Traffic moves again. He barely makes it to his accounting office on time.

6.

He is twenty-eight years old. It’s three in the morning and he can’t sleep. This is the worst it’s been in a long time.

He gets out of bed so he won’t disturb Patty. He can’t bear to lay silent and still in the dark, sweat lodging between the back of his neck and his pillow, heart pounding dissonantly in his forehead. 

Straightening the NYU tee shirt he’d worn to bed, he wanders into the kitchen for some water. The half-drunk bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, one they’d picked up on their trip to the Napa Valley last summer, is still sitting on the counter. They’d opened it with dinner. He and his wife both agreed that it was good-- dry but not too dry, sweet and tart like blackberry jam on toast. As he drinks his glass of water, he considers following it with another glass of wine. Maybe it would help him relax. Maybe it would help him sleep.

He sighs, setting his empty water glass down, and wipes a drop of dislodged water onto his pajama pants. 

It wasn’t even dreams tonight. He hasn’t been asleep at all-- just spent a few hours pretending, trying not to hear his own thoughts, trying not to think of the thin eyes and twisted mouth and grey, sickly skin he kept seeing whenever he closed his eyes. The menacing

woman,

He knows she is from something, that he didn’t conjure this image in his own imagination. Knows this because he does not conjure images in his imagination ever, just words, numbers, solutions. Knows this because there is a sickening sense of paranoid nostalgia, a rancid sort of déjà vu, that cloaks over him when he thinks of her.

It had only been a couple of hours tonight, though. He and Patty had stayed up later than usual, watching a movie and then just talking. She’d cried a little bit. Leaned her forehead against his shoulder. All her girlfriends from high school and college had babies by now. Why won’t it happen for us? We are young and healthy.

He just comforted her and held her, told her he didn’t know, but really, he almost thinks he does know the answer. The same way he knew that marrying her was right, that moving to Georgia was right, that passing on the first accounting job he’d been offered out of college was right (and sure enough, she was magic, and Georgia was perfect, and a better job offer came in the very next day). 

But the Turtle couldn’t help him and his friends when he was a kid.

He starts a little, stiffening, looking over his shoulder. His breath catches in his throat. There is no reason for him to think these things. For him to see three a.m. For the dumpster sized collection of negative pregnancy tests that stalked him like a bad memory. And yet, these things all are.

And he almost knows exactly why.

7.

He is twenty-nine years old. He is sitting in the waiting room of a fertility clinic, holding his wife’s hand, stroking her skin with the pad of his thumb because he knows she’s nervous. He glances over. Watches her tuck her wavy dark hair behind her ear. It cascades over her shoulder, masterful brushstrokes that belong in a museum.

A short man in a FedEx uniform wanders through the front door, a large box in his arms. Where do you want this, he asks the lady at the front desk. Just set it down, she replies. He does so. She signs for it. He leaves.

Stanley’s eyes are drawn to the box, if only to stop staring at his wife and avoid the TV in the corner, which is showing videos of adorable chubby babies crawling and chewing on teething toys and laughing and sleeping. He blinks. 1000 GAUZE ROLLS, SIZE 4. 

Gauze. For a moment, frowning in this waiting room, which is silent except for the elevator music playing-- he thinks he remembers something. Remembers a 

small boy with big eyes,

And a box of gauze bandage in his hands, remembers sneaking out of a pharmacy-- did we steal it? Did I steal something once? He blinks again. There was a girl, too, who helped them pull the thing off. This

girl,

She came just at the right moment, just in the nick of time, and she solved whatever problem they’d been dealing with, whatever had caused them to need gauze, size 4 or otherwise. The pharmacy he almost sees is a familiar place, a real place, one he’s visited far outside of his mind or the state of George. Thin aisles, a counter at the end, a high school bully behind the counter-- but that part didn’t matter, because he was among

friends,

He’d loved them. The girl with the solution, the boy with the gauze, the boy who needed the gauze, the loud boy, the gentle boy, the boy with the stutter.

In a flash, he forgets them again, but he loved them. For everything he is and was, he loved them.


	2. thirties

8.

He is thirty-one years old. Airports and airplanes are crowded and germy and they stress him out, but it's his eighth wedding anniversary, and why can't eight years be worthy of celebration? In two years, we'll do something even bigger, he'd promised his wife, her hand in his; but let's do something this year, too. She had smiled. Kissed his cheek. Agreed easily.

Anyway, their bank account is piling up with money they don't need. Their extra bedrooms remain empty. There's no need for college funds or Hanukkah toys or family vacations if it's just the two of them-- not to mention karate or art or dance or music lessons. They might as well spend the money on an all-inclusive resort in the Bahamas, sip mai thais and piña coladas on the beach, and go snorkeling. 

And after all, it's summer.

The plane is crowded, too many people trying to shove suitcases into the overhead bins. The Urises packed smart, as they always do; a shared checked suitcase for clothes and one smaller carry-on each for books to read on the flight and passports and sweaters just in case the plane is cold.

They're trapped in airplane limbo, stuck in a line of travelers waiting to get to their seats, gummed up by someone probably wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a fanny pack. He glances over his shoulder; she shrugs at him, adjusting her bag on her arm, an infinite waterfall of patience for everyone around her.

Two hours, and we can get those drinks, he says to her. She smiles and nods. Can't wait.

Another thought sneaks up beside the last one. Something they both think about every day. Maybe it can happen now; maybe a resort in the Bahamas is what it will take. Maybe they will come home with a third passenger.

The line shifts forward as he turns back around. He glances at his ticket even though he has their seat numbers memorized. 17b and 17c. He always chooses aisle seats on purpose. Otherwise, he feels boxed in, coated in a slick layer of unease like sweat after an uphill hike. It's the same principle that has him asking for tables instead of booths anytime he eats at a restaurant.

The rows pass, and a few steps later, he makes it to row 17. As he looks at the row numbers, though, he notices that on this plane, c is the window, and a is the aisle. He blinks.

Why don't you take the window seat, he suggests to his wife. They gave us a middle and an aisle.

She asks him if he's sure. He nods, stepping forward so she can get in the aisle, unwilling to hold up the line to discuss it. She tucks herself into the window seat, and he sits next to her.

Please, don't let there be someone in the aisle seat. Let us have the row to ourselves.

But of course, Stanley has no such luck. A tall man with long legs takes the seat, offering a brief business grin as he slides his satchel under the seat. 

He glances from his wife to the man, and then decides to just look forward. It's only two hours. In a moment he can pull on his reading glasses and open his book and read for two hours. Maybe he'll hold his wife's hand while they read their separate books. Maybe the tall man in the aisle seat will get up to go to the bathroom a lot.

The plane fills up and the doors lock and the flight attendants prepare the cabin for departure. The air feels thick in planes, almost dusty. 

Trapped. That's what it is, he feels trapped, and in many ways, he is. Backed into a corner, held down, hands on his shoulders,

teeth on his face,

He inhales sharply. Reaches for his cheeks. His fingers catch on two days' stubble, the start of a vacation beard. Underneath, there are faint scars from when his face was ripped open two decades ago. Scars that are just a part of his face, something he’s used to, something he usually doesn’t notice-- but now he’s thinking of Pennywise and he’s thinking of the scars.

The Bahamas aren't far enough. The south pole wouldn't be far enough. He gets the feeling that the clown could come for him no matter where he goes. He's running out of time. They all are. Only a few years left. His head fills with tight air.

The unease sticks to him like tree sap for the duration of the flight, but after a moment, he forgets where it came from.

9.

He is thirty-two years old. Sitting in someone else’s living room, sipping a glass of ice cold Chardonnay that’s just a little bit too cloyingly sweet, dinner plates having been exchanged for a deck of cards half an hour ago, he listens to his wife’s favorite co-worker’s husband rehash a story from his childhood. A family trip to Hawaii, jumping off cliffs into a cobalt lagoon.

He’s half drunk, having lost track of who was refilling his glass and with how much. He’d like to leave soon, to go home and just be with his wife in their quiet cozy getaway of a home, but maybe driving isn’t a good idea right now. He glances over to her, still listening to the story, trying to gauge if she is sober enough to drive or if they’re going to have to either get a taxi home or wait here for quite a while.

Flying through the air, the man says, words slurring together a little bit. It was so much higher than I thought it would be. It almost hurt when we hit the water.

Stanley blinks. Turns his gaze from his wife to the man. His brow furrows just slightly.

He feels it. Feels the air whizzing past his bare skin, his legs flailing a little bit as he careens downward, having misjudged how far it would feel. The smack of cold water against his body as it took him.

The water isn’t a natural feature. It’s an old quarry, abandoned, left to form a haphazard reservoir, fed into by the Kenduskeag. It’s dirty water, and almost stagnant, and freezing, and uncomfortably deep. If his parents found out he was throwing himself into it with reckless abandon, he’d be in big trouble. But it feels amazing. As he falls into it, his friends dropping like skipped stones around him, he feels more awake than he has before or since. He feels free.

Stanley, his wife’s soft voice comes from his left side. He starts a little. Looks to her. She glances at her watch. Should we call it a night?

He suddenly feels overwhelmingly sober. He nods. Offers polite thank yous and goodbyes to their hosts as he shrugs into his jacket.

They drive home in silence, his hand resting on her thigh. That water, he thinks. Clear and smooth and filthy. He tries in vain to recall its source, to assign it coordinates, but he can’t. It’s too deep in, wedged into its place by a dull haze of forgotten memories. 

10.

He is thirty-four years old. He is holding his wife’s hand under the table, stroking her skin with the pad of his thumb, enjoying the secret closeness of the action. It’s a warm for early spring, warm for Massachusetts-- warm enough that the Blum family Passover dinner is being held outside in the backyard of one of Patty’s uncles. He prefers the matzo ball soup they make together most years over what Patty’s aunt and uncle just served, but the fresh air is nice. The sun sets gently behind where he sits with his wife, haloing her curly hair enchantingly. As he notices this, he’s glad they opted to book a hotel room instead of staying with her parents. Glad for the big, crisp hotel bed that waits for them in place of the floral sheeted double in her childhood bedroom, glad that it means he can make his beautiful wonderful halo’d wife gasp tonight once they leave the confines of the family holiday.

If they were alone now, he’d raise her hand to his lips and kiss her knuckles. But her entire extended family is sitting around the table too, and both he and his wife have a strong distaste for PDA.

He tunes back into the conversation, having lost it for a moment or two, mind dominated by appreciation for the way the setting sun glows around Patty’s dark hair and thoughts of what he wants to do with her later. 

Her cousin has become the center of conversation. He’s turning thirteen soon-- preparing for his Bar Mitzvah. His parents complain that he isn’t taking it seriously. Isn’t practicing Hebrew enough.

Stanley smiles a little bit at this. Thirteen is a little young to allegedly become a man, he thinks. He didn’t feel like a man until he was an actual adult. Maybe not until he graduated college and got a real adult job.

they slice the tip of his dick off

He glances over his shoulder, startled, twitching. He feels eyes on him. His wife, her parents, the others at the table. He offers half a smile and mentions a bug. They accept it and return easily to their conversation.

A piece of a memory. A confused fragment, already having retreated back into the recesses of his mind. It wasn’t his voice. Wasn’t the voice of anyone he knows. It was a kid voice, talking fast, words sliding into each other. Distant. He squints a little, trying to place it, trying to remember the kid to whom it belonged.

there are terrible things you’ve forgotten on purpose, stanley

He blinks. His ears feel numb, and plugged-- deaf to the continuing Passover conversation, deaf to everything except the beating from the inside of his chest, which has become erratic. His grasp on his wife’s hand has become vice-like. Ever graceful and patient, she hasn’t pulled away. He loosens his hand as soon as he realizes. 

There are terrible things he’s forgotten on purpose, and at the cost of forgetting these things, he’s forgotten others too. He’s forgotten his loud-mouthed middle school friend. He’s forgotten his own Bar Mitzvah.

His father was a rabbi. He must have had one. There’s no way around it. No way he would have skipped it-- his parents wouldn’t have allowed him to. And besides, he wouldn’t have wanted to. His religion, his culture-- it means something to him. 

you weren’t ready, we all know you weren’t ready, you ruined it on purpose didn’t you, you ruined it because of

because of

He blinks again, and stands up, excusing himself, and goes inside the house to shut himself into the bathroom. He blinks at himself in the mirror.

Only one of his friends came, he realizes. He had friends. The loud-mouthed boy who’d said the thing about chopping the tip of his dick off, the louder-mouthed friend who had shown up to his Bar Mitzvah, and others besides. A whole group of them. A clump, inseparable, bonded by something he can’t recall and couldn’t define even if he could recall it. But only one of these friends showed up that day, a kippah tacked onto his Catholic head, an ill fitting suit hanging onto his thin shoulders. He’d ruined his Bar Mitzvah on purpose, and his one friend had clapped at the chaos. He’d run away to the woods with this friend after. Sat together, kippahs in their hands, suit jackets hanging on a nearby tree branch, and he’d felt terrible. His friend comforted him. Made him laugh. He can almost remember the kid’s name.

In a way, he knows why he’s forgotten these things. The Bar Mitzvah, the friends, everything. But just enough to know that he absolutely can’t afford to remember. No matter what, he has to let the memories pass when they appear, let them fade back into nothingness like they’re supposed to. Remembering would be worse. Remembering would mean

for a second he feels like he’s about to die, a tighter fear than has ever gripped him, except that it has before, it’s an echo

it’s an echo

every

\--

years, that’s an echo too

He lets his knees fold. Lets himself sink to the bathroom floor, hands on his face, shaking knuckles over his eyes. He aches for Patty, needs her, but can’t stand the thought of going out there to get her. On the off chance that she has her cell phone in her pocket and her ringer on, he sends her a shaky text, asking her to come inside please.

She’s knocking on the door a moment later. Always exactly where he needs her to be.

When he lets her into the bathroom, he closes the door behind her, and hugs her tight. She hugs him back. Her voice is soft and concerned when she asks him why he’s upset, what’s going on, talk to me, please?

He shakes his head, eyes shut tightly. He can scarcely breathe. What would he even say? He doesn’t know the real answer himself and he knows finding out would mean

it would mean

He holds onto her tighter. Only lets her go after she explains her plan, in a soft voice against his shoulder; she’ll go out there, tell everyone he has a migraine and the reason he’d asked her to come inside was because he wanted to know if she had any Tylenol in her purse, and now they have to leave because he needs to lay down. Once again, she has solved everything wrong with his life, made everything better for the thousandth time as if it’s nothing. As he drives them back to their hotel, his jaw tight, his eyes on the road, he feels a burning love for her, and an icy beckoning from the lockbox deep in his mind.

11.

He is thirty-five years old. Sleepless, once again, in the middle of the night. This time, full of nervous energy. Getting up to read in the living room is not going to cut it tonight, so he swaps his pajama pants for jeans and pulls a jacket over the tee shirt he’d worn to bed, quietly, careful not to wake his wife up. He figures she needs rest more than ever, after the physically and emotionally painful disappointment she’d had to go through last week.

They both want to have a baby by themselves, naturally, sure. They’ve certainly dumped enough time and money into the endeavor to prove that. But he’s beginning to wonder if maybe they should give up on that and start the adoption process instead. That way, they could help someone, could give a baby who already exists a loving home instead of just sitting in their own decade-old grief. It’s not that he thinks the failed IVF and the ovulation tests and the most recent IVF miscarriage are putting a strain on their relationship-- not at all, he doesn’t think anything could-- but it’s beginning to feel like they’re just chasing disappointment after disappointment. That if it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to happen ever.

It’s not her. Somehow, he knows that it’s him. That he’s the problem. Even though they’ve both been tested and medically, on paper, his body is perfectly capable of supplying her with his half-- he knows it’s all because of him. The realization echoes every few years, resurfaces whenever something goes wrong like it did last week. Five weeks, it had lasted this time. They’d known about it for six days. 

He doesn’t usually care about the fact that he doesn’t have any friends. Wouldn’t usually notice. He’s content with just his wife, and occasional dinner parties or drinks out with her friends and their husbands. He doesn’t mind hanging out with the husbands a couple times a year and not thinking about them at all in between. He doesn’t mind that he doesn’t have any close family, that the other accountants at work are just colleagues, that he doesn’t have ski trips with his college buddies or whatever it is most people do. There’s no one he would rather spend time with than Patty, after all. It’s been that way since the moment he met her, drawn to her by some inexplicable live wire of certainty. Stanley Uris just knows things, a lot of the time, and he had known that they were meant for each other from the very start.

But tonight, as he wanders the neatly kept streets of his suburban neighborhood, hands in his pockets, the humidity caulking around his curls, which have gone darker brown with age-- he wonders if this is healthy. At times like these, when she’s hurting, he should be able to comfort her and take care of her and leave his own sorrows for conversations with his own friends. 

She has plenty of friends to talk to. Who wouldn’t want to be her friend? But he only has her. 

He mulls over the list of people he could possibly consider his own friends. Matt, his old college roommate, a permanent fixture in the wedding pictures that line the hallway of his house. Matt, with his bad jokes and his huge bottles of diet Pepsi and his loud mouth and his constant state of obliviousness. Matt, who never noticed if you weren’t in the mood or you didn’t think it was funny or you wanted to be left alone. Matt, whom he hasn’t talked to in maybe a whole decade, who was moving to Colorado, last Stanley heard. Not a great contender. Aaron, the other fixture in his wedding pictures, is living in Seattle with his wife and their three kids. He sees them on Facebook sometimes. A seven year old girl, a five year old boy, a new baby whose gender he can’t remember. Beyond the two of them-- the husbands of Patty’s friends? Or the only guy around his own age at the office, with his badly gelled hair and his stupid sports car he never shut up about?

There’s someone else, he thinks in vain as he turns the corner, cicada song ringing through the heavy midnight air. 

Something else moves through the air, too. A smell that he can’t help but cringe at, skunk-like-- an actual skunk spray, maybe? Whatever it is, it’s terrible, and he hates it. Wants to go home and take a shower and fold some fresh-out-of-the-dryer laundry just to get the dregs out of his nose. He looks around. Did he step in something gross? Is a car leaking some rancid new kind of gasoline?

No. All at once, he recognizes the smell, places it for what it is. Marijuana.

He blinks.

At once he’s sixteen or maybe seventeen, sitting in a basement with a boy and a girl, thick glasses on the boy’s face, a key around the girl’s neck. The basement window at the top of the room is cracked open. They’re sitting on the floor underneath it, passing around a Bible-page wrapped joint. Stanley took one puff and almost died coughing and left, disgusted, to go hang out with

another friend, this one more his own speed, a friend who didn’t like squirreling away vodka and marijuana into basements

a friend who liked to go on walks or bike rides, who didn’t mind when stanley pointed out birds

and if he and this friend ran into the bullies, whoever they were, not that he can really remember-- they’d have to choose whether to go for an ethnic slur on stanley’s part or a racial slur on

Stanley can almost remember his name. It’s one syllable. No, it’s two syllables, something neat and biblical, but most of the time he and their other friends would stop after the first syllable. 

A hole opens up in his heart, raw, vulnerable, an exposed nerve. He misses these half-remembered friends desperately. Misses the boy with the glasses and the girl with the key and the boy he would point out birds to. Misses the others, too, because he knows somehow that he’s only recalling half of them. He misses them all. Right now, he could really use them. But remembering them would also be opening himself up to something terrible. The Turtle couldn’t help them then, and it can’t help him now.

He runs a hand through his hair and exhales. Wonders if maybe he might remember more about that day and those friends if he stands in this nasty drug-scented air for another moment or two.

He doesn’t know for sure if he would remember more or not, but he’s not going to try. He holds his breath. Turns around, heading back toward his own home, allowing these half-unsheathed memories to fall back into their neatly organized void.

12.

He’s thirty-six years old. It’s a normal day at work. He’s wearing his favorite tie, navy blue patterned with little dark green diamonds, but it’s too tight, and it’s been bothering him all day. Every time he loosens it, it seems to tighten back up. He owns his own accounting firm now, with six accountants and two secretaries under him, so really he’s in charge of the dress code himself-- but it would look unprofessional to be walking around without a tie. Besides, his biggest client is coming in this afternoon, and he’ll likely be here any minute now. Stanley barely understands sports, but he gets the picture enough to understand that this guy owns a few different teams and merchandising rights for the teams, and that these things bring in the big bucks.

He tugs on his tie for what has to be the hundredth time. Straightens up his desk, even though his office is always spotless, everything tucked into its place, everything dust-free and facing the right way and straightened. He can’t think otherwise. A single pile of paper, if it’s messy, tugs his mind in every possible direction.

His desk phone rings. He answers it. Stanley Uris Speaking. It’s one of the secretaries, letting him know the sports guy is here. Send him on in, Karen. Thank you. He hangs up.

The man wanders into his office a moment later, knocking on the ajar door as he does. He greets Stanley with a wide grin and sits in the chair facing his desk, setting down an armful; the familiar red binder containing the man’s financial information, a worn yellow legal pad, and two magazines. Without really meaning to, Stanley looks at the covers of the magazines for a second. Food Network magazine. He wouldn’t have pegged this guy as a chef. The second one-- Architectural Digest, with an overly-posed picture of a man on the front, wearing a denim shirt and

a familiar smile

Stanley? Have I lost you? The client asks.

He blinks. Shakes his head. Sorry, he says. Sorry. No. I just noticed your magazine there. I think I went to school with the guy on the cover.

Ben Hanscom, the man says after glancing at the magazine. Talented guy. We’re looking at him to head our new hotel project. That’s why I picked this magazine up. I thought I could get a little bit of a read on him.

Stanley almost stops listening after ‘Ben Hanscom’. He knew this man. Knew him when he was a kid. 

So you went to college with him? The client prompts. Stanley shakes his head. Middle school, he corrects. In Maine.

What was he like? You think I should hire him?

Stanley nods, smiling a little bit. Yeah, he says. When we were kids, actually, he built us the coolest clubhouse. All by himself. You’re good to go if you have him on your team. He won’t let you down.

The guy begins to lay out his financial plan for his new hotel, the one Ben Hanscom is going to work on, fingers crossed. By the time Stanley makes it home, three or four hours later, he’s completely forgotten the cover of Architectural Digest and the clubhouse and the name.

13.

He’s thirty-eight years old. It’s a pleasant Sunday afternoon, and he’s wandering through a locally-owned independent bookstore with his wife, each of them looking for something new to read. She likes books that take place at least a hundred years in the past; he likes interesting non-fiction books or sometimes mystery books or speculative fiction. There’s nothing new in any of these sections, though. Nothing he hasn’t read already or perused the back of, at least. He devours books faster than his favorite writers publish them. He hates leaving the bookstore without at least two paperbacks, though, so he takes a second to carefully widen his usual horizons, and he turns to a shelf he wouldn’t usually look through.

Horror. 

It’s not fear that keeps him away from this genre. He doesn’t really think anyone could write something in a book that would scare him, and he has a very strong and steady grasp of which threats are real and which aren’t, a notion he keeps neatly lined up with all his other beliefs, alphabetized and dusted regularly in the library of his mind. No-- the reason Stanley prefers to stay away from horror books and scary movies is because he knows he won’t be able to suspend his disbelief enough to enjoy them, and he knows they would leave him unsatisfied, because characters in these stories always seem to act so stupidly.

If I were in a horror movie, he thinks as he scans the shelf, I wouldn’t be that stupid. If something scary started happening, I would just leave.

His mind stalls at the spine of one book. William Denbrough, it reads, in big block letters, a contrasting white against the black spine. He frowns a little bit.

He used to know a

big bill, stuttering bill

He used to know a William Denbrough. When he was a kid. When they both were.

It’s only one of five or six books by the same author, all lined up together, different titles. _The Attic Room. The Glowing. The Black Rapids. The Dark. Smoke Hole. Silver._ He reaches for the first one, sliding it carefully from its place on the shelf. It’s around four hundred pages, which is his usual preferred length for a book; not too long or too big that it’s heavy, but not too short that he would finish it in less than a week. He turns it over in his hands. On the back is a small headshot of the author, of Bill Denbrough, looking very serious. His hair is different. Of course it is, as you grow from a middle school kid to an adult, your hair color and texture tend to adjust themselves. Bill’s is the same color Stanley remembers it being, but it’s not so stick straight anymore.

He reaches for the second book, _The Glowing_ , and tucks the pair under his arm. He finds his wife a moment later, her own pair of fiction books in her hands.

What are those? She asks, her brows furrowed just a little bit. Horror? Really?

I know the guy who wrote them, he explains, turning them around in his hands again. An old friend of mine. From middle school. 

I hope they aren’t too scary, she says as they take their place in the checkout line. 

14.

He is thirty-nine when his old friend Mike Hanlon calls. When he is forced to remember the things he’s spent nearly three decades forgetting, half on purpose, half on accident. When he is forced to run the numbers to figure out what he should do.

He writes two letters. One to his friends, with a sticky note asking Patty to make six copies. Then he starts to write a second letter for her. He makes it two lines before he stops and rips it off the legal pad and crumples it up. He crumples the first letter up, too, and takes off his reading glasses, and leans his forehead against his desk, his pulse an angry chant against the wood.

He decides, painstakingly, sharply, that he will not take a bath. It would be easier and safer and better but he will not do it to her. He promised he would never hurt her, and this would hurt her worse than anything else he could do. So he has to go to Derry.

He un-crumples the two pages carefully and feeds them into the document shredder underneath his desk. Then, his heart lodged in his throat, almost swelling it to the point that he can’t speak, his hands wedged hard into his pockets, he wanders back into the living room.

What’s wrong? She asks. I was just going to come check on you. Who was that on the phone?

So he tells her about Mike. And he tells her about Derry. As much as he can, anyway, in just a few minutes. As much as he can without bursting into hollow, desperate tears. She listens carefully. Frowns. Nods a few times. He does his best to make it sound believable, but he knows it doesn't. 

So I have to go, he concludes. I have to. I’m so sorry.

She nods again. I’ll get us tickets, she says. You call the hotel.

No, you can’t--

Stanley, she says patiently, do you think I’m going to let you go alone? I’m not. You aren’t going to win this argument so there isn’t any point in trying.

He stares at her, his mouth drawn tightly, and eventually he nods too. And they pack, and they go to Derry, and they go out to dinner with his six old friends-- a wonderful night followed by a terrible one, but in the end, the seven friends hug goodbye and promise to stay in touch, and he flies home to Atlanta with his wife.

Less than a year later, around his fortieth birthday, on a warm spring day, standing in a hospital room, he holds his son for the first time. The baby doesn’t have his mother’s eyes, or his father’s; a perfect medium between the two, earthy and soft. Half an hour later, he makes four phone calls of his own.


End file.
